Until the core physical experience of trauma — feeling scared stiff,
frozen in fear or collapsing and going numb — unwinds and transforms,
one remains stuck, a captive of one’s own entwined fear and
helplessness. The… perception of seemingly unbearable experiences leads
us to avoid and deny them, to tighten up against them and then split off
from them. Resorting to these “defenses” is, however, like drinking
salt water to quench extreme thirst. Booker’s split comes at a pivotal
baptism scene, implied to take place directly after Wounded Knee
although with no sign of the battle in sight. It’s here, the game tells
us, that one version of Booker decides to become Comstock, washing
himself clean of his sins, putting the past behind him, and eventually
going on to create the floating white theocracy of Columbia. Yet
Booker-as-Comstock is repression, stagnation, Peter Levine’s avoidance
and denial; he deals with his trauma by powerfully and absolutely
pretending it never happened.

That’s the salvific promise of the
game’s understanding of baptismal doctrine; but the past, it goes on to
show, cannot be wiped away. Columbia is Comstock’s monument to
everything he won’t deal with, a testament to the all-saving power of
staying stuck and the bandage on the unbindable wound of his actions.
With Columbia he can write a new story about Wounded Knee, about the
Boxer Rebellion, about the False Shepherd and the Lamb and the future
and himself. With Columbia he can pretend that everything is fine.

/.../
Having a wife and a family could have
been the coming back to life Booker needed, but instead, when it ends in
tragedy, he turned to the violent, ugly life of the Pinkertons. Peter
Levine writes, “Humans… reterrorize themselves out of their (misplaced)
fear of their own intense sensations and emotions… [making] the process
of exiting immobility fearful and potentially violent.”2 Or, as Comstock tells Booker, “It always ends in blood.” Unlike Comstock, Booker’s efforts are at
least kinetic. He dives headfirst into the person he was, trying to
solve his problems through the actions that caused them in the first
place. Columbia was made for him by him, or another version of him. It
is a playground for every one of his maladaptive coping strategies and a
place where he can spin his wheels under the guise of getting better
while simply rehashing the same old things. It ends in blood because he
brings it, because he can’t bring anything else.
/.../

When it does go wrong, Columbia is
Booker’s ideal therapy room. In this floating city, everything that
wrecks his life on the ground leads to success.Non-Columbia Booker
clearly has a drinking problem, but in Columbia drinking makes him
healthier. Non-Columbia Booker is pretty broke, if the losing gambling
receipts in his room are any indication, but in Columbia people toss
their riches in the trash; money is easy to come by and easy to spend.
At the Good Time Club in Finkton, a powerful stranger offers Booker the
job of head of security and forces him to “audition” for the role,
according to the club’s marquee, through a series of increasingly
difficult wave battles. To me, this is Booker auditioning for
the role of himself, a chance to indulge in all the violent impulses
that lived in his heart through Wounded Knee and the Pinkertons and to
be lauded and praised for them. His annoyance and his determination to
just do the job that brought him to Columbia are all lies. There’s no
way he isn’t enjoying it, because it all makes sense; it feeds back in
on itself, re-traumatizing him, trapping him in that endless loop. He
drags Elizabeth into it too, helping her deal with her dead mother
through the same audition format: a series of wave battles with her
ghost to prove herself worthy of the dead woman’s love./.../

As I played through the end of Infinite
and the game made its strange sense of Booker’s story, I understood
what I had been doing to myself more clearly than any website or
pastel-covered self-help book had been able to point out. I saw how I’d
let my past define me, how I constantly ran it over in my mind, refusing
to try a new door, a new way, refusing to let anything else in. If people had done bad things to me I
couldn’t make them stop by doing bad things to myself. Just as Booker
couldn’t end the cycle of bloodshed with more bloodshed. Just as
Comstock couldn’t end denial with more denial. Booker’s looping timeline
showed me my own and pointed to the thing I seemed to most fear and yet
most want: that I’d be dead inside forever, because even though it was
terrible, at least I knew it was safe. When Booker decides to step away
from that, to let his past drown him at the baptism, to submit fully to
the weight of everything that happened… well. We don’t quite know if it
breaks the cycle, but at least it’s something new.

§Mental
illness in fiction is often used as a way to strip individuals of their
humanity and, in doing so, reflects a cultural fear of what happens
when we, too, descend. The horror of Eternal Darkness therefore lies not
in the monsters your character must fight, but in the long-term impact
of encountering those monsters.
/.../While
Eternal Darkness explores the descent into madness and casts insanity
as something to be avoided at all costs, Psychonauts takes a more
comprehensive view.
/.../the
game does not equate “mentally healthy” with being neurotypical in a
direct fashion, nor does it tie competency to lack of mental illness or
past trauma. Not only does pretty much every camper training to become a
Psychonaut have traits that code for a mental illness—two happy campers
are plotting suicide in attempt to gain more powers, a boy wears a
tinfoil hat to avoid making things explode, and another child has
extreme hydrophobia—but so do some of the camp instructors. Even
characters that don’t have obvious coding, such as Raz, are shown to be
wrestling with a deeper issue of one kind or another. For Raz to “fix”
an issue obviously associated with a mental illness or help to resolve
feelings over a past trauma, the person must be afflicted by it on some
level; he does not assume particular eccentricities are a problem in the
absence of related distress.
/.../If Eternal Darkness is a game
that speaks to “normal” people’s fear of going insane, Psychonauts is
one that delves deeper into what being mentally healthy actually means.
Eternal Darkness assumes it is impossible to see terrible things without
going mad; Psychonauts largely assumes you’ve gone through something
terrible, but recognizes the impact of that on your psyche is dependent
on how you handle it and how your mental landscape looks otherwise.

§

I was taken aback by the idea of having a conversation with someone who my mind immediately identified as another enemy. Another body to add to my ever-increasing count in the game. But instead, here I was, talking and trying to coerce information out of someone who was clearly an intelligent being. This seemingly mundane occurrence of gently subverting the horror genre’s traditional Othering of its enemies into flawed but complex portrayals was one of the many achievements of Troika’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.
/.../
Games, particularly the ones that rely on having the players commit violent acts, have a poor reputation of stigmatizing mental illnesses through a negative portrayal, often equating people with such illnesses to monsters.
/.../One common way the horror genre antagonizes those with mental health issues is by depicting them as exhibiting violent, psychopathic behaviour that threatens the safety of the player character. The endangerment of the player’s own well-being in the virtual world is a condition many action-based horror games use in order to justify the violent actions the player is then encouraged to commit towards the disabled bodies.
/.../However, Othering goes beyond the problematic representation of enemies. Mechanics like sanity meters are commonly used in games like Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem to describe the mental state of the player character. If the meter is filled to its maximum, it would generally result in the player character going “insane” and trigger a fail state. This mechanisation is deeply problematic, as on top of reinforcing existing stereotypes about a group of people, it further deepens the stigma surrounding them by misrepresentation. One of the most common misconceptions perpetuated by the stigmatizing mechanics of horror games is the false notion that mental illnesses lead to criminally violent behaviour.
/.../By establishing a setting which treats characters with mental illnesses with respect, Bloodlines tries to humanize key Malkavian non-player characters, and communicate empathy to the player.
/.../
Bloodlines is a strange and fascinating game on several levels. This is apparent already in the character creation scene. One of the six possible clans the players can role-play as, the Malkavians, are a group of vampires who suffer from a variety of mental illnesses including hallucination and schizophrenia. However, within Kindred — the colloquial term for the community of Vampires in the game’s universe — they are respected and treated as equals, and are often regarded as seers and oracles. Even within the Camarilla, the ruling body of the Kindred, Malkavians are given an equal seat of power, and thus represented fairly. By establishing a setting which treats characters with mental illnesses with respect, Bloodlines tries to humanize key Malkavian non-player characters, and communicate empathy to the player. Bloodlines consciously avoids this negative stereotyping by carefully portraying every Malkavian NPC you meet during the course of the game as non-aggressive.
/.../
dissociative identity disorder (DID). Bloodlines deals with this issue in an interesting way by utilizing the same approach it does with Malkavians. It treats them as who they are, first and foremost — humans. This can be seen with how the game deals with The Twins.
/.../
Both Therese and Jeanette are respected by other NPCs in the Bloodlines world and it presents an example of the game providing a safe space in its universe to the Malkavians. Seeing the world treat Malkavians like Therese/Jeanette with respect acts as a deterrent for the player to Other them for their mental illnesses. Bloodlines, by adding a personal background to the characters, humanizes them and makes it easier for player to empathize with them. By foregrounding their humanity, Bloodlines allows Therese/Jeanette’s character to evolve without forcing stereotypes pertaining to their condition. However, it doesn’t fully evade the problematic aspects of the representation of Malkavians. By presenting their personality traits as eccentric and mystical, it creates a stereotype which reduces every Malkavian to that specific set of characteristics.
/.../
Bloodlines’ ambition comes to the fore when the you as a player choose a Malkavian character to be your protagonist. Unlike other clans, a Malkavian Player Character (PC) has a largely different script and they often speak in convoluted and vague dialogues to other characters. These dialogues have a vague tone which may be cryptic and opaque to a first-time player. However, what’s interesting to note is that these very dialogues are designed to serve as foreshadowing to a player on a repeat playthrough of the game. Many of them subtly hint at major revelations well before they are actually scripted to occur in the game’s plot.
/.../
By doing that, Bloodlines also implies that while words of someone suffering from mental illnesses are often relegated to ramblings by society, they may contain wisdom that may require a deeper understanding. It still can be seen as a form of Othering, but without much of the negative connotations that stigmatize people with mental illnesses. The kind of understanding, which in the context of the game, that only players who have experienced the game would have.
/.../while representing Malkavians as non-violent eccentrics subverts expectations established by horror tropes, that does not necessarily make them more relatable. Or do the methods Bloodlines employs fetishize characteristics we associate with people having mental conditions? It’s worth asking if representation in media always runs the risk of objectification on some level, no matter how nuanced it might be.

§

As a therapist, I’d like to say that every group session I’ve done with young people goes great. Unfortunately, the truth is that some sessions are marked less by epiphanies and more by blank stares, fighting, and crayon-eating. The main difference? Whether the day’s topic actually resonates with the group.
/.../
Instead of tearing up the floorboards and replacing all of our current analogies with gaming references, I suggest that we recognise video games as a font for cases where kids have already encountered (and often triumphed over) real-world issues. Mario Kart wasn’t just a thing that those kids knew — it was a place where they felt anger and betrayal. It confronted them with the fact that their friends don’t always support them. For those kids, a reference to Mario Kart was an acknowledgement of these complex experiences.
/.../
There was a pause as the boys mulled these questions over. One boy disagreed. He started to tell me how the situations were nothing alike, when another boy leapt to his feet. “I’m stuck, and I don’t know what to do,” he proclaimed. “But there could be something, I just haven’t thought of it. There’s no CPS wiki. But there could be.” That’s the power of gaming analogies. I didn’t have to sell them on changing their perspective or altering their behaviors. They found their own way in, using examples that were relevant in a context that was meaningful to them. Minecraft provided real experiences of being stuck and having to wait. Minecraft provided real alternatives to “think of all the people you’d like to threaten.” The boys had already encountered their current problem. What’s more, they’d already triumphed.

§

tension
between the potential freedom afforded by games and the baggage that
cannot be outrun is especially pronounced in games about anxiety and
depression. How do you try on new identities when an emotional
condition tinges everything? Is anxiety one of the things players leave
behind or a part of real life that bleeds into games?
/.../
There
is no shortage of games about anxiety and depression. The past year and a
half has seen an explosion of small, personal games, all of which
sought to address this subject in their own way.
/.../
I don’t
want to be happier. I’d gladly settle for that, but it’s not a real
goal. Instead, I only wish for a bit more perspective, just enough to
get through the day with a minimum of fuss. The same is needed from
videogames: A little more perspective on what they can and cannot tell
us about others or ourselves. As in other media forms, anxiety and
depression aren’t signs of artistic seriousness—you can be a serious
artist or author without these afflictions—but they are challenges that
should be taken seriously. We now have enough games to form a group
therapy session and hope some greater context comes of the exercise.
That context is needed—it is one of the few areas in which I am
confident of not being alone.

§

One 2013 review from the American Psychological Association found that strategy videogames enhanced problem-solving skills in young children, and had the potential to increase “emotional resilience” in daily life. In-game failures aren’t a dead end for children, the report argues; rather, when presented with a conflict, young players create coping mechanisms that help them advance through the game. In real life, investing energy into everyday life can be an overwhelming experience for gamers with mood disorders. The sheer abundance of negative thoughts and feelings from depression can make the outside world feel too complex to handle. However, videogames are designed with a solution in mind for the player to achieve. They present an interactive space for the player to overcome conflicts without any real world consequences for failing. In gaming, we tend to believe, there’s no such thing as a permanent loss — just restarting.
/.../
XCOM also lets players choose Easy or Normal difficulty options for a much more manageable experience. In most situations, in-game risk has been diminished to the point where players simply have to use cover and prioritize enemy targets in order to win missions. So as the player learns the game’s mechanics at their own pace, they can also become more confident in their abilities to succeed, and subsequently move onto the harder difficulty levels. This is particularly important for players with depression or anxiety, who might have a low threshold for in-game challenge. Afterwards, they can take on the harder difficulty levels.
/.../
Take one article review published in the American Journal of Play, “Video Games: Play That Can Do Serious Good.” According to the authors, action, puzzle, and strategy videogames enhanced logical and visual information processing capabilities for their players. Extended time playing the strategy game Rise of Nations, for instance, improved “task switching, working memory, and abstract reasoning” among individuals suffering from age-related cognitive declines. Likewise, action and puzzle videogames improved players’ ability to prioritize decisions and quickly switch between tasks. Alongside cognitive therapy, videogames help the brain operate more efficiently while observing and understanding information. Hard data also shows that videogames can improve cognitive functioning, diminish the effects of depression and anxiety disorders, and can even be designed for therapeutic purposes. According to TIME, the cognitive behavioral therapy videogame SPARX successfully helped 44% of players completely overcome their depression, with 66% experiencing decreased depression symptoms after playing the game. Likewise, in a recent study at Michigan State University, researchers found that their shape-identification videogame “improved concentration and lessened anxiety for the anxious participants [who played the game].” Associate professor of psychology Dr. Jason Moser even concluded there was a potential to open a new market specifically for videogame therapy.
/.../
However, videogames are not a saving grace from mental illnesses. Overuse presents real barriers for behavioral therapy, and relying on a videogame for personal happiness can develop addictive habits in players. Without healthy boundaries and proper health care, mental illnesses can fester under gaming addictions.

§

The spinning blades are no more nonsensical than the chainsaw wielding maniac. Neither belongs in a mental institution,but they do belong in a campy/creepy game environment. The fact that the place purports to be
some kind of madhouse probably won’t matter very much to what little
narrative there might be. It’s wallpaper to act as a backdrop for
bludgeoning and butchery. It could as easily be a carnival full of
insane clowns or an abandoned hotel full of insane bellboys, or an
insurance office full of insane filing clerks.
/.../
Earlier today, I had a peculiar reaction to the footage of The Evil
Within that oozed through the clogged pipes of the interweb from the
Eurogamer Expo and directly onto my screen. As Craig pointed out, the
spinny-blade room is so daft that it’s immediately rendered
non-threatening. Finding such a machine in a mental institution raises
logistical questions rather than the hairs on the back of my neck.
/.../
at their best, games can implicate us in ways that traditionally observed media cannot and turn the screw an extra few degrees.
However, games can also fill their corridors and torture chambers
with the mad, and make otherness and illness things to defeat or to hide
from rather than to engage with. That’s much less imaginative, much
less empathic and, most damning of all in a creative industry, much less
interesting.

§

This, we are made to understand, is how you become a heroine, a tomb raider. Our
lead characters have to be hard, and while we accept a male hero with a
five o'clock shadow and a bad attitude generally unquestioned, a woman seems to need a reason to be hard. Something had to have been done to her.
/.../When you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you
want to make a man into a hero, you hurt… also a woman first.
/.../
"Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian,
whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious,
artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to
be Strong." Further, we seem to have problematic ideas of how women
become Strong -- men break them, we assume.
/.../
Abstracted ideas about post-traumatic stress disorder or the catch-all
"mental health issues" are common in games -- apparently the logic is if
we're trying to advance narratives in action games, we need to find
nuanced rationales for why we're killing so many people with aplomb.

I wanted to start from one simple word, one that is used by marketing
departments and journalists alike; it pervades reviews, previews, the
lexicon of indie games and it trickled down to gamers themselves. The
word ‘addictive’. Gaming is, as far as I know, the only community in which the word addictive is considered a positive.[This piece is really personal and hit home for me, even if my story
with depression is quite different and has made me play less and not
more games for the last ten years (but before that, yep, had me playing
Baldur's Gate 2 constantly for three months).§

Any designed work can be decomposed into two different kinds of features: Intrinsic features and extrinsic features.
An intrinsic feature is something we judge to be a non-reducible atom
of actual value that the audience wants and the work provides—that is,
the work’s purpose—while an extrinsic feature is anything that exists
solely to realize that purpose, providing no actual value in itself.
/.../
The
intrinsic features of Art media like literature or film, unlike those
of hammers and map APIs, are not easily reducible into language. Whereas
to design a hammer involves finding ways of realizing features whose
value is readily apparent, to make Art is to search for value lying
beyond the edges of our understanding: To capture something we know is
important to us even though we cannot quite say why.
/.../
Videogames
inherit a little from Art but mostly from product design, which has
been kind of a problem for us. As an industry we put faith in the idea
that there is intrinsic value in the games we develop, although we don’t
think very expansively about what that could be; instead we abstract
it, using ugly words like “content” as placeholders for value without
ever proving that it truly exists. We then set about designing
incredible machines that shuttle players towards these placeholders with
extremely high efficiency, which as designers is really what we’re good
at. We make the interface as usable as we can because players need it
in order to learn the rules. We teach the rules very carefully because
players need them in order to grok the dynamics. We shape our dynamics
strategically because enacting them is what will stimulate players to
feel the aesthetics. Somewhere at the core of all this, we suppose,
lives the “content” players are attempting to access: That which we have
abstracted away so that we could hurry towards doing safe,
understandable product design rather than risky, unfathomable Art.
/.../Problem
Attic is an unfashionable game. It does not aspire to resemble that
which currently exists but with a cool twist, nor to stuff all its value
into the margins of a popular genre format. It is authored, rather
than just designed; its intrinsic features take the form of complex and
multifaceted statements that it realizes at all levels of the modern
videogame, from core systems all the way up to the user interface. It is
messy and, therefore, alive.
/.../
Everything we see is built
from colourful, patterned tiles. Although there are perhaps twenty or
thirty different kinds, most are not mechanically distinct from one
another; all space is partitioned into two contiguous parts, ‘wall’
versus ‘not-wall’, with each patterned tile corresponding to one of the
two. Our first instinct is to label this a poor design choice because
its affordances are unclear. (Why should the player have to learn
through physical experience which tiles can be traversed and which
cannot when it could be made visually obvious?) This, however, would be a
mistake. Conventional thinking conditions us to believe clear
affordances are unequivocally good because we view videogame design as
an exercise in catapulting people towards the mythical content unicorn
lying beneath all of our systems; this belief becomes invalid, however,
when unclear affordances better support some other intrinsic purpose
lying elsewhere in the structure of the work, and that is the case here.
The environment of Problem Attic models the mind of the protagonist,
and the walls represent the tangled mess of every habit and belief he
has ever internalized. Each person possesses such walls; they are the
reason why we act against our own best interests, making the same
mistakes over and over again.
/.../
Here is another unfashionable
choice. Punishing us for touching the Cross Guys even though that is
exactly what we must do to proceed reeks of poor affordances; it seems
to place the design at cross purposes, obfuscating the rules of the
system and causing us to form an inaccurate cognitive model of how the
game works. Again, however, Attic demonstrates that clear affordances
are not unequivocally good. This game is about human beings, who result
not from mythical content unicorns but from a roiling maelstrom of
culture and fraying DNA. The Cross Guys are characters, not mechanics,
and the game characterizes them as simple-minded horndogs who give no
consideration to the protagonist’s goals and, in fact, seek solely to
gratify themselves at his expense. In their role as the protagonist’s
jailers they must usually be avoided; in their role as the wielders of
power, however, it is occasionally necessary to exploit them even when
this does us harm. (The mechanics deceive, in other words, because they
model deceptive power structures.) That the world forces some among us
to use the ugliest of personal traits to their advantage would, in any
other context, be considered a thoughtful bit of hard-won wisdom that
speaks to the human condition. In videogames we are, for many
discomforting reasons, unaccustomed to receiving such wisdom.
/.../
We
may not confront the Cross directly; it cannot be destroyed or
pacified. We must instead discover a circuitous route through a maze of
nearly-invisible wall tiles, the room’s muddy platforming permitting us
to feel the protagonist’s paralysing fear. Interestingly, pressing the
magical ‘R’ key here does not reset the stage as it normally would, but
instead fades the world to black before casting us out to the attic’s
entry point. This particular stage, I hereby surmise, is not a place for
trial and error, to learn or to grow; it is more like a wound that
won’t heal, a nightmare to which the protagonist returns nightly.
/.../Problem
Attic changed the way I think about videogames. I am now convinced that
the virtues of clarity and craft, to which I had subscribed absolutely
as a matter of course, impose significant limitations on our expressive
potential that can be difficult to see until you play something like
this.

2.DOET [Design of Everyday Things] judges the user’s needs most
important, and her perspective most valuable. It is about the apotheosis
of the user; it makes her into God, and with holy might it strikes the
fear of Her into objects and those who make them.
/.../
DOET, alongside all the important research around it, culminated in
something called User Centered Design, a philosophy in which “user
error” does not exist and programmers are sad.
/.../
This school teaches that if it’s not fun (or at the very least quick and
painless) to be taught about some feature, we shouldn’t include it;
that clarity is better than complexity; that elegance is better than
messiness; that one button is better than two. It teaches that the
purpose of a game is to explain itself to you, and that somewhere in the
act of explaining lies that game’s intrinsic value. We have thereby
converted the scariest, most contentious question of all (what should
this thing be?) from an artistic decision into a design decision.
/.../Our
belief in clarity and elegance, though it has yielded spectacular
results, is not the very best way to make videogames; it may not even be
a particularly good way. We suffer from the bar we’ve set for ourselves
and the burdens we place upon designers. We are wrongly convinced, even
in the critical community, that works like Problem Attic are unworthy
of attention solely because they prioritize different features and
challenge players in a way we deem to be unfashionable.
/.../I plan on thinking much harder about how I evaluate potential game
features. “Because then the user doesn’t have to think” or “but how do
we teach that?” should not be trump cards in every single argument about
whether to include stuff. It’s easy to turn everything into a neat
little design decision, but making a few more artistic ones would be
better in the long term for users and for my sanity

3.

I develop videogames for a living, but I spent last year
really hating videogames. I questioned how it was I could consume 60
hours of ‘content’ for Assassin’s Creed 3 yet feel utterly unsatisfied
by my act of consumption. I questioned what it was I had consumed, other
than my own time. I questioned what it was I sought from the game in
the first place. I questioned the nature of the ‘content’ it claimed to
offer me; privately I began to suspect it might not even exist.
/.../
I awoke from my yearlong stupor the night I encountered a game called Problem Attic by a person named Liz Ryerson.
/.../This
is a story about how Steam, Twitter and the App Store came to exist.
It’s about how these services present themselves as our friends while
behaving as our enemies. It’s about how they stole the internet
from us, creating a place where everything is ‘free’ but liberty remains
unavailable. Before I can reclaim my lost appendages we must first reclaim something
more fundamental: Our language, the medium through which we think.
Consider the power inherent in the words ‘form’ and ‘content’. ‘Form’
describes what the things we make are; thus they who define form decide what things can be. ‘Content’ is more powerful still because it defines what we want;
they who define content decide what is and is not valuable. Like all
powerful words, ‘form’ and ‘content’ have a political history.
/.../
To Hegel what we want from our media is not merely a convenient way to
waste 60 hours of our lives: What we want is access to universal truths.
/.../
When we consider Art in Hegelian terms its purpose is not mysterious or
difficult to grasp. For him Art is simply one of three different kinds
of form (the other two being philosophy and religion) through which
humans access the same content: Geist, the omnipresent mind and spirit of living ideas.
/.../
Hegel once declared, famously and obliquely, that ‘art is dead’.
Scholars do not agree on precisely what he meant by this, but my
preferred interpretation suggests the art we fully understand is, by
definition, already in the past. Art of the present must be alien,
unfathomable and difficult to identify because it is of young
mind/spirit. It is the bleeding edge of truth, reaching beyond what is
achievable through discursive means to seize something new and untamed. Spelunky has a spirit I can feel as I play it. I need not feel anxious about whether its procedurally-generated elements (its Rogue-like
parts) permit some kind of ‘meaningful artistic statement’. Rather, it
is through enacting and observing the movement of these elements that
its spirit, the Spelunkengeist, shall gradually come to life.
/.../
I believe our intrepid capitalists of yesteryear used newspapers, and
other forms of mass publication, to introduce a new politics of form and
content to the world. Where Hegel used these terms to distinguish ‘the
work itself’ (form) from ‘the ideas behind it’ (content), the newspaper
uses them to distinguish ‘the machine that aggregates/distributes’ from
‘the writing that fuels this machine’. What once was called ‘form’ is
now ‘content’, and what Hegel would call content can no longer be
described; it has fallen so far into obscurity that I must resurrect a
19th century German term just to communicate it in English.
/.../
The concept of ‘replay value’, so critical to today’s hottest
newspaper-likes, stems directly from this formula: Since we evaluate
‘content’ quantitatively it follows that a publication or videogame
could increase the value of its ‘content’ either by improving yield
or reducing the cost of production. We have hereby come to prefer our
‘content’ the same way we prefer our pig feed: Smooth tasting, from an
Ikea-branded trough. Think about how a 19th century philosopher like
Hegel might regard the concept of ‘replay value’. Would he commiserate
with us about how the mind/spirit of romanticism just doesn’t make for
large enough murals? Or would we have to pull out a bunch
of obscure 21st century English words just to explain to him what the
hell we were talking about? It’s important to realize that ‘replay
value’ is not some timeless virtue sought by all media for all of
history. It is a political viewpoint wrapped in a sales pitch
perpetuated by people trying to improve the market position of their
mass-produced entertainment products. By appropriating the word
‘content’, which denotes what we want, our intrepid capitalist
marketers have steered us away from the conceptual, spiritual and
artistic content Hegel envisions. All we want now is more stuff for a
lower price.
/.../
As a multicast medium the internet is not a
seller’s market; it is, in fact, the greatest buyer’s market of all
time. The writer’s predicament no longer involves convincing some
corporation
to make copies of her words; that part is practically free. Her
predicament now involves capturing the attention of an audience with
virtually limitless options available to it, then somehow converting
this hard-won attention into half of a living wage (presumably through
a pagan ritual like crowdfunding).
/.../
our intrepid capitalists sought to appropriate the concept of freeness
while appending a commercial twist: They planned for web services to
become free as in gratis,
turning “do it yourself” into “here, let me publish that for you in
exchange for the right to profit from it and oh, by the way, have a look
at this Chevy ad”. In the span of three or four years everything about
the internet changed: The do-it-yourself, Geocities-like, weird internet
of the mid ’90s became the professional, social networked,
boring internet we have today. We retroactively labelled this movement
‘Web 2.0’, a term describing the set of technologies and design/business
axioms that on the surface intend to anoint the user as a free (libre) contributor rather than powerless consumer while on the underside exploiting her contributions as freely given (gratis) ‘content’
to be sold as a commodity. The idea was to craft a sales pitch
around the prospect of creating Hegelian content, content as libre, while simultaneously converting readers’ contributions into ‘content’ as gratis to
fill the paper’s pages. They no longer intended to act as gatekeepers
between producer and consumer; all consumers would now become producers,
multicasting ‘content’ back and forth to one another through the ‘form’
of the all-in-one medium/product/town hall/marketplace the newspaper
would soon become.
/.../
Where the newspaper transfixed the reader by telling her what happened recently the web service would tell her what’s happening right now.
Where the newspaper monetized its audience through crude instruments
like subscriptions and broadly-focused mass advertising the web service
would seek to monetize everything: The user’s personal relationships,
her attention, her demographic data, her politics, her labour, her
secrets, her entire life. Our beleaguered dreamers would finally get
their wish. The user would no longer be a powerless consumer. Instead
she would become something much worse. She’d become ‘content’ itself, a
person qua commodity whose only real power lies in her potential to be
consumed. She would be a human AA battery, in other words, digested one
limb at a time by the hundreds of giant software systems now
descending upon her.
/.../
Gone is the HTML/CSS with which we contended in the MySpace era; gone is
the bloated wall of features we encounter every time we open
Facebook. Just like a videogame the Tweet™ is easy to learn, difficult to master and punctual with its feedback. (Twitter has excellent game feel.)
/.../
When we encounter a situation like Sarkeesian’s, something outside the
parameters of the sales pitch, our typical response is to blame it on
some hostile other (‘the trolls’) or some fundamental defect in the
internet. Though we may chide Twitter for failing to develop
effective anti-harassment policies we reason the blame must lie
ultimately with us users; after all, the sales pitch convinces us that
Twitter makes us free as in libre, and ‘a few (hundred
thousand) bad apples’ may therefore choose freely to do harm. We neglect
to consider the possibility that Twitter did not fail at anything; that
preventing harassment has never been Twitter’s goal because the service
has far more to gain from permitting this sort of bullying than it
does from preventing it (new and more interesting ‘content’, increasing
entrenchment in its role as town square, more investment from users,
etc…). As far as Twitter is concerned the ideal anti-harassment policy is just
effective enough to prevent Sarkeesian from leaving while simultaneously
permitting thousands of people to enjoy harassing her every day. In
this way Twitter doesn’t need to engage directly in the Charles Foster
Kane-style yellow journalism of its predecessors; it reaps the same
rewards (while incurring very few of the risks) by allowing users to do
so on its behalf. So long as we continue holding Twitter solely to the
standard of its sales pitch the service remains free (as in libre) to preside as a ‘neutral third party’ over the very culture wars it facilitates, dropping a Promoted Tweet™ or two into our timelines between all the vicious bile.
/.../
We ought to regard the Tweet™ suspiciously,
as a glorified status update tuned more towards Twitter’s data mining
business than to our ostensibly free expression. We ought to insist
Twitter shape itself around our work rather than shaping our work
eagerly into Twitter’s business model (and thanking it for the
privilege). We ought at least to demand Twitter use some of its
extraordinarily lucrative data mining expertise to fight the harassment
of our peers rather than tacitly affording it. Instead we fixate on the libre hand dangling a new social appendage in front of us while the gratis hand converts all our ‘freely given’ energy into its own money and power.
/.../
The ‘form’ of Twitter, like that of the newspaper, demands a constant
stream of new things to bury all the old ones. It wants there to be
cases in which we miss things so we’ll adopt the underlying assumption
that work should shoot past us like a copy of The New York Times
rather than stand in permanence like the Bible, awaiting our approach.
The bell curve we see is not the inevitable product of posting work on
the internet; it’s the product of routing our work through a host of
different web services designed to consume the new and then discard it.
We chide Twitter for how ineffectual its search functions are, how
challenging it is to obtain any legible historical record of our
contributions to the free dialog its sales pitch claims is taking place.
We ignore the implicit acknowledgement that Twitter does not want us to
remember this history; that in fact, Twitter wants us to
forget. It wants us to depend on new ‘content’ rather than dwelling
in the old. It wants us to have a presence to maintain rather than construct. It wants us to forget the name of the author we just read but remember to Tweet™
it at all our friends no more than two or three times. It wants to be
a windswept desert made from a billion atoms of homogeneous
and disassociated ‘content’, ‘freeing’ us to build castles in the sand.
The libre hand promises us an oasis while the gratis hand c converts the whole internet into a desert.
/.../
As
developers our game can be good or bad; we can self-promote or be
totally obscure; we can spend a year in development or three days. All
these variables are completely non-predictive. Nobody knows how success
on the App Store actually works and no one ever has; hiring some
ex-Apple consultant to help us would be about as effective
as ritualistically slaughtering a goat. The App Store is a madhouse in
which success is entirely arbitrary. Usually when we find
ourselves participating in an arbitrary selection process granting
invariably low odds of success we don’t call that ‘egalitarian’; we call
it buying a lottery ticket. Every game theorist knows lottery
tickets are a waste of our time and money. The mistake we make when
dealing with the App Store is, once again, watching only the libre hand as it offers us the chance of a generous reward for our hard work; we ignore the gratis
hand tossing our name into a hat. This is why, looking upon the
madhouse, our response is to assume there is some defect in the service,
perhaps poor ‘discoverability’ or a lack of curation. We neglect to
realize that from Apple’s perspective these are not defects.
Apple presides, as a ‘neutral third party’ of course, over a lottery
that generates ~30% royalties regardless of who wins. They have no
reason to ‘curate’ or to make our apps ‘discoverable’. Their goal is to
do just enough to keep players and developers imprisoned in the
‘ecosystem’, locking everyone inside a horrific Thunderdome of their
creation (oops, I mean a ‘walled garden’) while charging admission for
the privilege. When we observe today’s class of small,
broke, powerless game studios subsisting from tiny mobile project to
tiny mobile project, we typically attribute their existence to
an apathetic audience and/or soulless business executives. We neglect to
notice how convenient our ‘neutral third parties’ might find it that
these developers are incapable of renegotiating the royalties they pay
or, say, founding a new ‘ecosystem’ of their own. Today we see Valve
travelling in the same direction as Apple, and we wonder whether Gabe
Newell can ‘fix’ the madhouse. If you’re Gabe Newell the madhouse is not
broken.
/.../
Consider, most damningly of all, the ways in which the web service makes
our work interchangeable. We approach Twitter, Steam and the App Store
with the newspaper-like mentality that wider distribution is always
better. We neglect to realize the internet is a buyer’s market:
Maximum distribution means maximum competition between ‘content
creators’ alongside minimum risk for the marketplace itself. Not only
does this make it difficult for developers to carve out an audience; it
also creates tremendous downward pressure on the value of our work.
Anyone intending to charge money for their videogame faces an army of
competitors willing to give theirs away for less, or for free. The
audience sees little difference between one piece of work or another; it
wants what the medium tells it to want, so what it wants is ‘content’.
/.../
We do indeed face an existential threat. Our wallets, however, are the
only place we shouldn’t look. We fail to realize the closer we get to
‘free’ the higher the hidden cost, and the more our intrepid
usurpers profit from the ruin of everything around them.
/.../
the change I want must resemble the form of Attic itself: A tiny fire in a mound of corporate detritus, growing a little at a time.
/.../
For
years beforehand my thinking had actually been fairly
pro-capitalist; I often espoused the myriad benefits of currency and
commerce. What I never did was consider the problem in terms of
consumption versus communion. I realize now I had fallen for the sales
pitch. This is not to say, however, that I currently advocate some
bloody communist revolt circa 1917. Instead I believe in sublation as
Hegel describes it. The internet is not some idyllic communist utopia
ruined forever by capitalist invaders; that is not the
whole truth. Without capital the internet would be a weird
intellectual ghetto; without community it would be a hopeless corporate
nightmare. It was the coalescence of these forces that gave the
internet its mind/spirit and created the Information Age.
Neither force is capable of simply erasing the other; thus, the whole
truth must result from both of them. The only way forward is to let
them merge together into something completely new.
The heart of my complaint, then, is not merely that predatory
corporations exist on the internet. It’s that we don’t recognize them
for what they are. It’s time to accept what ‘free’ really means, and to
demand an equitable share of the proceeds our labour generates.
/.../
The most important tool you have against capitalist hegemony is
understanding the whole nature of the transactions you perform. Remember
you are not merely a ‘content creator’ if you don’t want to be. You
don’t have to alienate the form of your work from its content, shaving
all the edges off so it can exist as a grain of sand in someone else’s
desert. Make the work YOU want to make and shove it down the
internet’s throat.
We who Twitter views as ‘content creators’ now live in a world where,
paradoxically, the most anti-capitalist measure we could take is to
charge money for things. I believe we need to do this whenever possible.
/.../
Recall that Hegel models ideas as fundamentally historical:
Free structures of thought whose lineage stretches all the way back into
antiquity, guided forward by the recollection of past mistakes. Yet in
the capitalist dystopia we are quickly coming to inhabit there are no
‘ideas’ anymore. There is no form, no content and no libre; we live in a world where ‘free’ means gratis, ‘form’ means Twitter and ‘content’ means Tweets™.
Recall that appropriation is what capitalists do best. The goal of
appropriation is to erase history entirely: To focus solely on the
eternal now, divorced from all context, leaving us no basis on which to make choices.
/.../
Your latest project does not need to exist solely as two weeks’ worth of
viral bait in someone else’s ‘ecosystem’. The projects you’ve done in
the past do not need to languish as half-eaten corpses somewhere in a
forgotten database. Create a history for your work by interconnecting it
in meaningful and permanent ways (not just in Twitter mentions).
Provide paths from the new to the old. Connect it permanently to other
people and ideas so that these ideas can grow. Your work is not a
commodity; it’s alive. Build a home for it.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

I've always enjoyed horror. It's part of who I am. I love horror. But do I, really? I used to love the exhileration of running home from a friends after having watched a horror movie because I was so scared of what might be out there. I even enjoyed the fact that I had to run with my hands in front of my face because I thought someone had maybe strung a line of some sort to cut my face up in my path home. It becomes more bizarre still -- I actually cherished the nightmares I had because they were such a creative outlet and inspiration and seemed so much more real than my waking life in some sense. And so I've always loved horror. But those nightmares are long gone, and I don't run home from friends apartments anymore, and if I do hurry on my bicycle, it's because I''m afraid actual people might hurt me, and not Chucky the doll or a Terminator . And that's no fun -- that's no fun at all. There is a difference. But I do still love feeling alive, and I do love the bizarre and surreal.

I've come to the conclusion that I don't enjoy traditional horror anymore, but that I do enjoy horror tropes, existential horror and some form of cozy horror. You know, the eerie conversations between characters that take place in Silent Hill 3 to the sound of triphop beats. I feel that Kentucky Route Zero at times is the Silent Hill game I've been waiting for. It is a different beast altogether in many ways, but it has that surreal nightmare quality over it that I associate with Silent Hill as well. I loved Pathologic as a horror game, but don't think I at any time during it felt I had to take a break because I was too scared. And that's a good thing, it made it possible for me to enjoy the horrific qualities of it all the more. The darkness of Undertale isn't visceral but sublime. The horror of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories isn't visceral, but realizational. Slow-paced. It's the same with Kitty Horrorshows, David Szymanskis, Sherlock Connors and Cameron Kunzelmans horror games. They all have a long tail and haunt me after I've stopped interacting with them, because they bring something else to the table than a good scare. I'm not afraid of Chucky running after me in the dark anymore, but I still love how good horror experiences can get under my skin.

In theory, I adore the horror design of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It's pure genius that you can't look directly at the horrors that haunt you, and that you must hide in darkness from them - the very place where your sanity is depleted. But an hour or two in and I just don't care anymore, even if I try to follow the story that takes places in the notes found. I thoroughly enjoy reading Thomas Grips blogposts about video game horror design and the philosophy by which Soma was created, but I need more than good horror mechanics to be interested, and if something's too scary, well, then even the parts that are "more than just good horror mechanics" become fuzzy enough to be blocked out. And fuzzy isn't cozy nor existential.

Kitty Horrorshow"I still like telling stories, but I
want to make environments to contain the stories, so that people can
walk around and feel present and be absorbed and crane their necks up at
things.”Recommended game:Chyrza. No frights, just chills down my spine, all the way down. Exactly the way I like my horror.

That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this. - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.YzHZfC6F.dpuf

That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this. - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.YzHZfC6F.dpuf

I’ve
dealt (and still deal) with a lot of questions and uncertainties.
That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.VHvUGoxC.dpuf

I’ve
dealt (and still deal) with a lot of questions and uncertainties.
That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.VHvUGoxC.dpuf

"I’ve dealt (and still deal) with a lot of questions and uncertainties. That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game, because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than just this."Recommended games: The Moon Sliver and The Music Machine, and not because of their tangential story connection, but because they affected me the most. The have the best characterization of hir four games and explore hir relationship to faith most succinctly.

§§§

Rough, discontinuous edges; looming
architectural masses; bulging swathes of colour—all of them luminous, or
cast in shadow. These are just some of the effects you encounter in the
growing genre of freeware horror and landscape games, spearheaded by
the likes of ceMelusine, Kitty Horrorshow, and Connor Sherlock.
Together, they constitute a “glitch art” known for its lethargic smearing-together of retro graphics with dreamlike and impossible aesthetics.
§Dialogue and thought texts appear where the speaker or thinker would
have been standing. The pop-ups thus work like stage directions overlaid
onto a 3D environment, adding another layer of interpretation to the
scene: Not only are you piecing together the flow of conversation, but
the flow of movement as well. This gives the empty, dead, and lonely
world a surprising dynamism and life that makes the story feel more
immediate, more in-the-moment./.../The Moon Sliver is all about interpretation and misinterpretation
and reinterpretation, and the presentation of its story forces us to
live in that same state of confusion as its characters.
/.../
So when we do find the titular Moon Sliver, that holy document of
prophecy, and we hear of its concrete morality and its precise
blessings, the simplicity and straightforwardness of its divination
becomes very attractive. Precise prophecy is so much more comforting
than the vagaries of life. It’s no wonder these people worshiped The
Moon Sliver. It offers understanding.
But now The Moon Sliver is gone, and we too feel the oppressive
confusion that consumes the remaining islanders. Is its prophecy true?
Are its blessings real? Who are we without it to guide us? Who are we in
general?
/.../
The text never prioritizes one point of view, preventing us from forming
a sympathetic bias towards the protagonist. Or rather, we’re allowed to
form a sympathetic bias towards each character since any one of them
could be the protagonist, could be “us”.
/.../
The game combines past and present, purposefully trying to confuse us
about identity and time because it knows both of those things add
context to a scene that change its meaning, and The Moon Sliver wants us to be aware of this change.
/.../The Moon Sliver is a story of four worlds, one belonging to each
character. Each of us constructs our own world through our own
experiences, and when those experiences aren’t enough, we may or may not
turn to others to fill in the blanks. It’s tempting to live in our
world only, but The Moon Sliver forces us to live outside of our own head, showing us a drama from every perspective.

Chapter One introduces a bunch of theory and argues that how the participatory nature of videogames does not render them immune to textual analysis.
/.../
Chapter Four makes the argument that ‘action’ is too reductively considered when we talk about videogames and that ‘looking’ and ‘listening’ are acting in their own right. To say a play ‘does nothing’ during a cut-scene greatly misunderstands how bodies engage with moving images.

"I was surprised how many people watched my rather strange film. At the same time, looking at the stats, I was even more surprised how few of the viewers actually watched the entire movie to the end. There is a lot of scrubbing going on. I somehow thought I'm the only one who jumps around on the timeline of internet videos, but it's everybody." His reaction was to produce a new short film, which eventually would become a short computer game, called Plug & Play. The idea was to give the viewers, who are all so eager to jump around the narrative, more control over his movie. At the same time he wanted to have more control over the way the audience experiences the film by not allowing to skip the narrative without interacting with it and therefore become part of it.

motherhood is often kept out of the creation, consumption, and conceptualization of popular culture. A society ruled by the Kingdom of Fathers, as Rich
describes, relies on the devaluing of motherhood while also
simultaneously tasking motherhood with the most invaluable work on the
planet. A mother’s reward for breeding humanity is exclusion,
marginalization, and disregard. At most, motherhood appears in popular
culture as a concept: a perfect, selfless mirage or a horrid, selfish
monster. Her story is never told in full: from her exclusion in
something as silly as #dadbods, to the continued absence of significant
maternal stories in mainstream videogames, TV shows, and films,
patriarchy puts the mother in opposition to pop culture—after all
there’s no quicker way to kill a trend than to see your mom do it,
right? However, 2015 revealed glimpses of the mother’s elusive profile.
/.../
While
mothers are busy getting refrigerated, there’s no shortage of videogame
dads who capture the multiplicity of a three dimensional human being.
The dadification of games took place long before fatherhood became the
focus of a few “gritty” big-budget titles. As an echo of our culture,
the paternal mentality has defined videogames for most (if not all) of
the medium’s existence: from Space Invaders to Pac-Man, the notion of
protecting your territory, conquering death through iteration, and
measuring success through monetary gain birthed the medium, and
continues to dominate game design to this day.
/.../
So we return
to the million dollar question: what would a truly maternal videogame
look like? There’s no doubt that Toby Fox’s Undertale relies on the
inhumanly selfless portrait of motherhood, but it does so with a
purpose.
/.../
Most players kill Toriel on their first
playthrough, even if they’re aware of the game’s morality system. But
this choice, rather than serving as a reflection of the player’s lack of
moral fiber, instead holds the mirror up to videogames themselves.
This, Undertale says, is the kind of player patriarchal game design
produces: impatient, quick to quit, and more than willing to sacrifice
their own mother and humanity in the name of…what, even? Progress? A
positive feedback loop? This vague and arguably meaningless concept of
“leveling up” through “experience points”—whatever the fuck that even
means in this context? As games like Undertale show, maternal game
design isn’t just about telling worthwhile yet disregarded stories. The
popularity of paternal game design is indicative of deeper issues,
ranging from how we as a society measure success and who and what our
laws protect.
/.../After decades of paternal game design, I am
eager to unleash the potential of videogames born of woman. Motherhood
deserves more than a cursory glance, and play deserves the benefits of
creation instead of destruction. If and when that will happen, no one
can say. But in 2015, we captured a glimpse of what fruit it can bear.

§

The only visible measure in Orchids to Dusk is the oxygen level on the left of the screen (and there’s no way to refill it).
/.../
It’s like directing your own funeral.

§

The beautiful terror of Year Walk is that in it, your deepest fears and anxieties are based on the truth. In a deranged twist of events, what I am experiencing is essentially a love story.
/.../My deepest fear is to have her eyes burn through mine and see her mouth the words, “I don’t love you anymore.”

At the end of the jump scares, ominous soundtracks, and haunting creatures, the fear of loss and betrayal is what lingers the longest in my Year Walk. We give ourselves entirely in seeking the truth and yearning for love to the point of a physical and emotional breakdown. Perhaps this journey is the most accurate description of love and heartbreak: a series of signs and symbols we have to decode, and we receive either the answers that provide us warmth, or remain lost in the freezing woods until we are freed to walk again.

§

As an adult, how does one learn to play electronic games?With no older sibling or friend down the block to teach, no community of mates to check in with, no memory of games from childhood, how does one begin, how does one progress?
/.../
I really think this could be easier. Can’t someone create a graduated list of games for adult-onset players, a series of games to take on, in sequence, that would build familiarity and component skills and even attitudes, in a conscious way? Most players I know have only the blurriest memories of how one learns this stuff, little sense of the parts that make up the whole: sorting it out might be an interesting project.

§

“The journey is more important than…the other thing,” muses one of your passengers, too enraptured by the pure alcohol of the drive to bother to complete philosophical cliches. And in a sense, that’s Glitchhikers. The emotion is more important than what the emotion might mean. Just being in the game matters more than…the other thing. The antithesis of other videogames, where making me feel something, some specific and preferably unclaimed by another developer emotion is the only and final goal, Glitchhikers allows me to ruminate, to imbibe, to simply “be”.

§

[Three Fourths Home]the dream of climbing the social ladder puts emphasis on the economic costs and benefits of ‘making it’, but ignores the more immaterial costs, such as separation from one’s family and loved ones. That narrative does not factor in those costs because they are not part of its implied values.

the family is almost entirely dependent on a medical corporation, possibly a health insurance company.

another effect of the family’s limited options and urgent needs is that they are hoping Kelly becomes a part of that same oppressive structure, which is very twisted if you think about it, but it’s a consideration that they cannot afford to do.

People don’t fight back against the powerful abusing their power, they beg them.

in CL [Cart Life] there is a sense that one may very well hold on and live another day, if they try hard enough, if they know their way around the city, if they balance everything just right. And even that is a slightly more optimistic perspective than Three Fourths Home has to offer, because systems can be read, can become not scary but familiar, and they can be manipulated. TFH offers nothing but a one-way street, with an emphasis on the emotional resonance of that mechanic, but also on its inevitability: there are no choices to be made, the dialogue options offer only superficial alternatives. The player has no power to shape the story, because the Meyers have no power to shape their story, like they have no power over the tornado that is approaching their house.

§CIBELEOne of the reasons why confessional storytelling
is so rare in games might be because of the way it puts a lie to one of
our most commonly held assumptions about players and the characters
they control. We generally imagine that, when you play as someone, you
are becoming them—adventuring as Lara Croft, saving the human race
as the Master Chief, etc., etc. Confessional narratives shatter that
illusion with experiences so specific and so tied to their creator that
the distance between the player and the character is always present. When we see Freeman’s pictures and hear her voice, her personhood is inescapable.
/.../
For
a few years as a teenager, I imagined myself living a double life, an
awkward teenage boy in one world and a creative, vibrant young man
somewhere beyond the bounds of an LCD monitor. Playing Cibele
highlighted the dissonance of my young identities and the way I used
technology to shape them. I was neither; I was both.
/.../Even if you can’t relate, Cibele still insists on a personal response.
If anything, my tendency to distrust Ichi made every moment with him
feel all the more intrusive and significant. I wanted to see myself in
his relationship with Freeman. Or maybe I wanted to see what she saw.

This
is a game about that drive to connect, to see others and yourself
clearly. It’s an experiment in how a creator might put themselves into a
work and make a game that speaks honestly about their real life to the
people who play it.

§

I often think about the fact we don't really have 'online lives' any more.
/.../online is real life now.
/.../
Nina
Freeman's Cibele is a gentle but involving callback to a youth when the
realm of internet chat—here, visualized quite literally through an
online fantasy game—could be an all-consuming, furtive repository for
everything fraught and unexpressed in our real lives.
/.../There
will always be stories of young love, and people probably meet online
now more than ever, perfunctorily, but it fascinates me that these
stories will never again happen in exactly this way.
/.../
Virtual
communication is no longer magic. It's no longer rare and risky, and as
time passes, more and more of us will be much the same person "here" as
we are "there." Lots of us today spend more time on devices than we do
off them. Friends and colleagues report being overwhelmed, not
intrigued, by Reddit threads, Twitter replies, Tinder messages, Facebook
notifications, Google Calendar invites, iMessages and texts. Now, for
me, meeting someone in a club late at night who has read my articles
actually recalls that old sinking feeling of finding out someone in your
internet roleplay group actually goes to your school—they've
accidentally found the real-life me, the secret me. The script has
reversed: nowadays, in the age of remote working and Real Name Policies,
some corners of real life feel more forbidden, more secret, than the
internet does or perhaps ever will again.
/.../Games like Cibele and Emily is Away are not just memoirs; they're memorials.When
today's young people want to whisper their secret longing and
loneliness into the night in search of others, will they still put it
online? If not, then where?

§

This is a game about a young woman’s experience,
fundamentally; it is her role you adopt, after all, her eyes through
which you see. But Ichi (voice acted expertly by Justin Briner) also
emerges with nearly equal vulnerability, showing a side of young men
that is only ever ruthlessly mocked if it is portrayed at all. He is
initially presented as that most loathsome figure in MMO gaming: the
tough-talking, foul mouthed, exacting raid leader who sees himself
cursed to be surrounded by idiots. But as you play, you see that he
is, in certain ways, Nina’s mirror; MMOs afford her the opportunity to
thrive socially in a world where she is not judged for being a nerd who
cheerfully describes her aesthetic as mahou shoujo, and they afford for
Ichi the opportunity to socialize without getting too close to people.

§

exhibitionism
and a confessional style of video game seems appropriate in this case,
given the game’s thematic interest in adolescent infatuation.
/.../
It’s a clever game, told in a clever way, that produces a very authentic representation of a fairly universal experience, but
it feels like that in presenting the story in as raw a form as Freeman
has that events here haven’t yet been considered with any maturity, only
idealism.
/.../
The game knows how to express itself well enough, but the
reason that it doesn’t really enlighten us in any way seems to be
because there is no sense of transformation of the character of Nina
herself.
/.../
Nina at the beginning was a girl
infatuated with presenting a certain idealized image of herself and her
world, and Nina at the end is a young woman that still seems infatuated
with presenting a certain idealized image of herself and her world.
/.../Maybe,
though, Cibele is simply intended as a fable or allegory. It’s just
disappointing to me because it initially seems to promise an
investigation of identity and exhibitionism that might uncover something
a bit richer, perhaps, more oracular, than those genres typically allow
for.

I've now
written three texts about games (Planescape Torment, Undertale, Life
Is Strange) where the way I played them and the outcomes of those
playthroughs affected my understanding of them1.
And in all three cases there are other ways of playing the game which
if one took into account all the possible playthroughs for ones
understanding of the game and tried to stack them on top of
each-other, one would have to alter ones conclusions drawn. Because
how can one be an asshole to ones companions yet still regain ones
mortality in Planescape Torment? How does all the themes of
acceptance in Life Is Strange fit in with the ending where one
decides on saving Chloe? Do those alternative (to mine) endings
contradict my conclusions simply because my conclusions were wrong to
begin with? I don't think that's the case, and I don't necessarily
believe that games should be only understood in the context of all
possible states that they might finalize in (or indeed be understood
primarily based on their final states).

All playthroughs of
games are worlds in themselves and can be regarded as consistent and
perfect. That doesn't mean that there isn't anything to gain from
going through a videogame with a different playstyle or thematic
predisposition compared to ones older playthroughs in order to inform
ones understanding of the universe that is a specific game as a
whole. Perhaps I'm wary of going down that path in part because it
takes more artistic genius to make all paths point in the same
general direction or at least give tools for satisfying
meaning-making in all paths. Then there's also the question of my
choosing the path which makes the more sense for me. It's not weird
that other paths don't seem as well-made – they weren't made for
me.

1To
be completely honest I did make it seem as if the actions I took in
Planescape Torment were necessary to reach the best ending at all,
but most of them really weren't. That's different from how ones
experience of Undertale might vary according to the path taken,
because in Undertale my interpretation might still hold in a
no-mercy run – the game is very different but it's not essentiallydifferent or dissonant with the Undertale of a pacifist run.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

Chloe: "Do you read minds as well, or did you travel back through
time and know I stole the chair?"Max: "It's the power of
best friendship. I know how you roll."Max Caulfield
has a super power – time traveling. But more importantly, she has
another super power – mind traveling (mentalization/theory
of mind/vibratory telepathy1).
This power is the power which makes us all potential "Everyday
Heroes", potentially "super" - potentially to the
max. It's the power with which Max reads the minds of the people
in Arcadia Bay, but also the power she uses to understand all the
possibilities that is herself. It's the power we as players use to
understand Max and all the possibilities surrounding the gamespace of
Life is Strange. It's the power the developers utilized when they
filled the world of Arcadia with clues as to what the focal point of
the story, a scene, or an exchange should be. It's the power of
imagination, introspection, prediction, questioning, of what-ifs,
maybies, chance, compassion, empathy, and with it we travel
both through space and time. It's the power that enables Max and us
to reach out to others. The power which enables Max and us to
treasure and value friendship and love, and ultimately to form bonds
that go beyond death itself. This power is an ability that, like
family, binds both ways, and it's what allows my existential
tethering to the strange lives of Max and Chloe, and enables your
traveling here, dear reader.

At the destination that is Life is
Strange, photography has a prominent and multifaceted role. There,
people use photography as a means of expression, and it's a means for
us as players to understand the people there. A way for us to gain insight into the
world and its inhabitants and their relationships to one another. It's a means through which we might come to understand others better in
some ways than they do themselves, and it's a way through which
people express things which they otherwise would not be able to, or
know how, to express. Max's diary was filled with drawings, pictures
and words which helped me to take her perspective and mantle "the role"
of Max Caulfield, photography student, teen girl, and a bunch of other descriptors. Max's diary was the picture through
which I could frame Max and the choices she made, or I made through
her – playing is, after all, a two-way mirror. Through me, Max's introspection
changed both the (meaning of the) past and the future.

Through photography we find out
different sides to people, see them in a new angle, or just in
hindsight see something which we missed the first time around, making
us go "I should have fucking suspected there was something wrong
with that guy, just look at his photographs!", but then realizing
that we didn't in fact blink twice because that shit's just the way
things are – both in the world of Life is Strange, and ours.

Photographs are also something which
we might remember people by, a bond beyond death, when they are no longer with us.

In Life is Strange, a photography isn't only something which is looked upon, but something which is used
for understanding and presenting oneself, a way of conceptualizing
and framing oneself in a broader, social context. Max is shy,
insecure, and uses her powers to gain social leverage – at least I
did in my playthrough and that playthrough is my phenomenological
reality of Life is Strange and thus the basis for this text. What kind of pictures does Max take?
Self-portraits, or "selfies". One might say that Max hides
in plain sight, and she certainly isn't the only one, being a
teenager and all. Max is the typical, overly socially conscious
high-school kid who knows very well the potential of photography and
how it might be used for an array of means – why else would she
take up the study of it? That pictures can be used for both
good and evil is an especially poignant point in the context of what
happened in Episode 2 of Life is Strange to Kate, a girl who was drugged and
filmed for the whole world to see on the internet,
girls-gone-wild-style. In a world where that kind of social stigma
and the wounds that follow it can be ripped open with a lazy click on a received link, it becomes
all the more important to at all times be prepared for "the flash", and
never forgetting to strike a pose. No wonder teenagers today are more self-conscious than ever. Then again, if one has the power
to turn back time, one might have other ways to deal with
embarrassment and a different way of grounding it in ones personal
and social narratives.

For my Max it was very important for
things to go just the way she wanted to, exploring different
timelines as one might explore different clothing styles, making it
second nature to appear more savvy than she really was. Chloe (her
old-new best friend) on the other hand seemed to live life without
regrets, was notoriously reckless and managed to get herself killed
in all five episodes, no matter how much Max and I tried to prevent it. Incidentally, Chloe is also a total wreck
and doesn't even attend Blackwell High after having been kicked out
of there. What of her pictures, then? They are basically just missing
posters of Rachel, the Laura Palmer of the story, of whom we learn
more as we see pictures of her with the most varied of people in
contexts we couldn't imagine when starting out, forcing us to
constantly re-frame what we think of her and the people who she
appears with in said pictures. Like the Prescott family, Rachel seems to
tie in with every aspect of the local community, as she does with the
other events which Life is Strange centers around and seem to be
collapsing upon; The Vortex Club and the End of the World
Party; Max's time traveling powers (symbolized by a spiral); the viral video of a drugged Kate gone-wild on the web; the
visions of a tornado which destroys Arcadia Bay (the actual
end of the world?); and the Everyday Hero Photography contest (its
promotional poster has a clear sky in it).

Being a (super) hero is no easy task
with all of these things superimposed on top of each-other. Under such circumstances (or indeed all teen circumstances), it might
even become an ordeal to be regular and just fit in, or understanding who you are and being yourself. Things get out of hand in Arcadia Bay and Max's world soon enough, and in
order for Max to get her happy ending we (think we) are forced to expand the
scope of our powers and not just settling for rewinding time 30
seconds in order to get the answer to a question in class right. Eventually Max learns that she can go back years in
time by focusing on the polaroids she's taken with her instant
camera. Through these we travel to little "time pockets of regret" where Max did something she regrets, but
also to scenes which we aren't a party to, share no blame in, but Max now thinks that she with
her new-found powers has responsibility to correct anyway, such as the case
of Chloe's dad dying in a car crash. Accompanying our mastery of
time-traveling are more frequent nosebleeds and more intrusive
visions of the end of the world, and so we start to suspect that
perhaps we can't, shouldn't, have our perfect ending after all. Not that this stops us in our tracks - our efforts to correct every wrong in life are instead doubled, as are our nosebleeds. We start noticing
small cracks in our grand plan, cracks that go back to the very first scene in Episode 1 where
we are chastised by the popular girl Victoria for not being able to
answer a question put forth by the teacher about "the derregiere
process". There, we first discovered our powers, rewinded time, and the very
first lesson from this very first rewind was that there were consequences even to the smallest of time-travelled changes, and that some things simply couldn't be "fixed". Victorias mind, and her fate, seemed to be fixed - we answered the question correctly and thought we wouldn't be chastised this time around, but we got shit from Victoria anyway,
because now Victoria thought we were a know-it-all, and had
no qualms telling us so. These cracks exist, because life isn't perfect, it's strange, and
its inhabitants are too. And fate, the strangest of them all, seems to have a sense of irony...

§

There is a lighthouse at the end of
the world. It stands erect on a hill overlooking all of Arcadia
Bay, in the eye of the tornado which is forecasted to destroy the
world. As such, seeing how it's perspective is that of one who has all of creation behind and thus in a way in front of them, it's a place for assuming the bird's eye view, but not only that, but also the best spot for opening the mind's (third) eye and contemplate all that has taken place. It's the site for
self-examination and revelation – for brainstorms. It takes a while
for Max to reach there, but she does, eventually. On her way there, she goes
through a nightmarish vision quest full of different scenarios that
are all about assembling data and courage for the gathering storm and
the final sacrifice that must be made at the end of the world. In that vision quest,
Max solves puzzles by narrowing data points and focusing on what's
important by looking in mirrors. There, Max gets closer to her truth by rummaging through the internalized
voices of all the residents of Arcadia Bay, hiding from some of them, and learning from others.
Before she reaches the lighthouse, she also gets to see her and Chloe's friendship's defining moments, a reminder of all the good that's been, and all the good she needs to let go of.
Before doing what needs to be done – letting her best friend die.

§

In Life is Strange, there were important decisions concerning Max's coming of age besides the final
one at the lighthouse, and other decisions which had nothing to do with the time-traveling that upset the natural order of the universe (as opposed to the mind-traveling which made us grow). It was when we were out of "time-traveling juice" that we talked down Kate
from jumping off the school roof. There we managed to save Kate
as well as the fabric of the universe, and we did it through non-supernatural means
– by knowing when to kick up dust with destiny, and when to accept it. We
didn't win the Everyday Hero competition, because we were too busy
saving lives, and had to make a choice, and accept the consequences that followed upon it. We were too busy doing everyday good deeds for Kate, such as erasing the link to “Kate's video” written on the mirror
in the girls bathroom, and other people whom we might call friends. Our Max Factor didn't turn out to be the ability to do everything at once, being "outside of time" but
communication, the power of having shown a big enough interest in
people in our vicinity that we might give solace to them when they
needed it, the most important example of this being that we took the time to understand Kate's situation well enough so that we might change her mind concerning suicide.

Speaking of time (do we ever do anything else here?), the pacing of decision-making in Life is Strange is
a bit "strange", or "outside of time", which is worth noticing. What I mean by that is that the decision making isn't timed as it is in similar games such as the Telltale ones, because Life is Strange isn't about tension during time, but about deliberation and taking ones time, in the sense of
preparing. About laying the groundwork for the future to come. About moments of decision as
photographs and echoes of future choices yet, and thus about looking back upon past decisions, revisiting and learning from them. And perhaps we weren't able
to rescue everyone that we wanted to, but our bonds with them weren't cut because of that, but instead remained strong, were
saved, by our having shared something special together. And through our super
powers of mind traveling, we might even ask ourselves just what those
we didn't save might be saying to us right now if they were here. We
just might even have photographs, or psychometric traces,of those special moments which
we can go back to in time and remember them by. Because the
"Psychometric Tracer" can not only leave impressions of emotions,
history and knowledge, the user of this ability contains a smaller,
imperfect echo of the entire universe within themselves, enabling them to search out
paths through probability to any desired future, effectively making
it a form of “time-traveling”.

At one point in Life is Strange, Max gets a plant from her parents, and
it survives to the end only if you water is just enough – not too
much, not too little, but manage to strike a balance between the two. Some things you can't save no matter how much
you water them, and your watering just becomes fuel for a storm of
some kind. Sometimes you never even get to see the consequences of
your actions, as with Alyssa, the kid you save from incoming
projectiles of different kinds in every episode. And that's part of
life as well. The more Max time-travels, the more her power expands
the scope of her vision, and the more she realizes that there are things
that she simply can't solve. The more conflicting
perspectives she tries to take into account, the less she feels like
the master of her own destiny, and the less capable she is of taking good decisions that stem from her own, imperfect self. It's as if power on that kind of Godlike
level seems to be constant, and no matter how great your ambition or
scope, it all comes back to the lowest level of actions – those in
the present. We use our capabilities of prediction to understand
others, but there are no certainties as to what the outcome may be.
In some time-lines and playthroughs, Kate didn't even survive and
what I would have taken away from Life is Strange would be quite
different. But in my world Kate did survive, and afterward she
acknowledges us being both not perfect and good:"You're such a good person, Max. Even if you're full of crap.
But I'll come with you... You're my friend." In
a way, we are not only Kate's friend, but also her Guardian Angel, and
Kate is not only our friend but also our Guardian Angel for reminding
us that we aren't Gods, nor ever will be, but that we are in it together, for good or worse, and that that is (just) enough.

Chloe is the driving force behind the main quest in the Life is
Strange. Max has the powers, but always uses them to protect Chloe
and further Chloe's goals. Who gave Max powers? Rachel? The
Prescotts? Some old Gods? Arcadia Bay itself? It doesn't matter, all
that intellectualizing draws our attention away from the heart of the
matter and what really hurts – the fact that we left our best
friend, and came back to find out that she had had a really tough time
while we were gone. The fact that we promised each-other that we'd
always be there for each-other, yet weren't. The fact that in our
absence Chloe had somehow managed to lose her childhood, but never
found a way to grow up.

Faced with all of this pain and regret, we
did the seemingly responsible thing and tried to make it all up to
Chloe, to protect her. But that decision (we realized just in the nick of time) was grounded in
the insecurity of the girl that was Max, a decision born from pain, denial, and immaturityl. Again and again we tried saving Chloe, both from destiny and
herself. Because we wanted to assuage our guilt. Because we wanted to
make things right. Because we suffered from the magical thinking of a
child, taking responsibility for everything bad in Chloe's life after
we moved out of Arcadia Bay. But growing up, we realize that we can't take responsibility for the
actions of others - that doesn't make us masters ofour destiny, and in fact makes it harder for us to take responsibility for that which is ours to own up to.
The signs concerning Chloes undeniable fate have been everywhere, practically screaming at us, and standing by the lighthouse with Chloe and looking her in the eyes, we
know now, at last, what we have to do, which is leave our best friend – again. First we get the chance know them, and when we come to love them, life demands that we let them go. I told you - fate is the strangest of them all...

§

In Life is Strange, people are
always-already diary entries – approaching them, they become
objects of interaction with their becoming outlined in the style of
our notepad sketches. All of the world is already "out of time" as they
are non-corporeal objects in Max's subjectivity, but they are also out of time
because the central conceit of Life is Strange - that we can save Chloe if we just play good enough - isn't a possibility, making
all of Life is Strange a picture rather than a movie - a memento mori where the challenge lies in letting go, rather than winning, and accepting the passing of Chloe, rather than passing some sort of skill test or trying to "game the system". Nor Chloe's nor Max's
quest was ever primarily about saving lives, but about saying goodbyes. For Max, it
was about having one final, awesome week as authority-defying
teenagers flying in the face of fate itself with her best childhood
friend. About getting a short moment as almost grown-ups together at the
lighthouse, immortalized in them being brave in the face of death and
inevitability. And in the end when the storm has blown over and our
time traveling capabilities are but dust in the wind, there are no
illusions of grand gestures left, only the power of friendship,
and the reality of both grief, and hope, in the aftermath of death. And though we've lost something precious to us, we still
have the world and all of the people there who we can travel to, and since we're still technically teenagers - kick up some dust with. We still have our mind traveling which we can visit Chloe with, and that's hella super. It just took us having been gifted with supernatural super powers and then losing them, to make us understand that. Ironic, isn't it?

1Vibratory
Telepathy: "By transmitting invisible vibrations through
the very air itself, two users of this ability can share thoughts.
As a result, Vibratory Telepaths can form emotional bonds much
deeper than those possible to other primates."
(http://lesswrong.com/lw/ve/mundane_magic/)
Mentalization (psychology):
the ability to understand the mental state, of oneself or
others, that underlies overt behaviour.

______

Special thanks to Geek Remix for
their wonderful contribution to the Life is Strange community in the
form of critical videos filled with astute observations which helped me
to better understand and appreciate the artistic merits of Life is
Strange.